Someone pointed out to me the other day that, without fail, I always eat french fries with my left hand. As I looked down at my left hand digging into the fries and then at my completely idle right hand, I was perplexed. Why was I eating my fries in such a particular fashion? Nature or nurture? It was obviously a learned condition, as I don’t know anyone else who does it, but the real question was how had I learned it?

As much as I analyzed my daily patterns, I couldn’t nail it down. Finally, it dawned on me: the mouse. Years of eating while I was on the computer had trained me to eat hand foods with my left hand and compute with my right. While this isn’t effective with a command-line interface, where I do a lot of my work, for browsing or reading it is just fine. Lately I’ve begun to notice there are several benefits to being able to eat with one hand, multi-task with the other. I’ve found it especially useful when driving, but that warrants a whole other article :).